Newegg had a deal on the 3TB version built into an external drive yesterday for $120 with free shipping. The user reviews all said it was the same high performance 7200rpm 3TB drive built into a USB3 enclosure and more than a few of them said they bought the external version because it was cheaper than the internal, removing the drive from the enclosure and repurposing it.

That's what I hope to do. I figured $120 for a reasonably high performing 3 TB drive plus a USB3 enclosure is a better deal imo than a $90 2 TB drive.

Same here, I've got a Seagate 2TB that dropped out of my mirror array waiting to go back on rma, and I paid about $90 for it two years ago.

I want big slow cheap mass storage that doesn't use a lot of power, and fast SSD where I need fast.

I have two of the 3TB drives, one CC43 (3gbps) the other CC45 (6gbps model) both for well over a year and not a single problem. 8500 hours on one, 7800 hours on the other. One handles my media, the other handles my p....torrents.

I haven't had a Seagate flake out on me since the 7200.9

However, my WD Black 2TB is much faster writing. Copying from my primary drive (SSD) to the WD is about 120mb/sec, the Seagate's are about 90mb/sec. They are all full and all pretty fragmented, but the WD seems to compensate for that better.

consumer drives in general appall me. a customer just had a 2tb external seagate fail on them yesterday after not even a year. it staggers me how expensive it is to get a large, quality drive these days. and when it's your data, and not just your money at risk, it really can mess with your head to read all those horrible reviews heh. i'd rather have a single 2TB Black than barracudas in RAID1.

Constellation and RE are a different matter, but holy cow are they expensive. We have 48 3TB Constellations and only one has failed, going on 4 months now. looking forward to some first hand opinions on the 4TB WD RE.

1 year... 5 year... doesn't really matter. I had 4 of 4 seagate 1 tb drives fail. The warranty replacements failed. The replacements of the warranty replacements failed. In the end, you don't even want the warranty replacement. I will never buy a Seagate drive again.

We have a 7200.9, if thats the 750 GB drives with the firmware bug. It was some fuss getting Seagate to admit it, but not horrible, like six emails with more details and requests to higher ups etc, then Seagate took care of it and recovered the data free and fixed the drive.

I am pretty happy with using raid mirror pairs of the 2TB, and the odd thing is the drive that dropped from the array could still be read, but had some odd ID issue and failed seatools diagnostic as well as the raid array refusing to use it.

Nobody normal can afford non consumer rated drives, but a one year warranty doesn't strike me as the manufacturer having much confidence in the drive.

1 year... 5 year... doesn't really matter. I had 4 of 4 seagate 1 tb drives fail. The warranty replacements failed. The replacements of the warranty replacements failed. In the end, you don't even want the warranty replacement. I will never buy a Seagate drive again.

Usually, when companies stand behind their product with a 5 year warranty, then they use better parts.
Sure, there are exceptions, but it seems that nobody can escape that if you purchase a HD these days, you are pretty much forced to buy two of them to have backups.

I also had back-2-back faulty RMAs from seagate.

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1 year... 5 year... doesn't really matter. I had 4 of 4 seagate 1 tb drives fail. The warranty replacements failed. The replacements of the warranty replacements failed. In the end, you don't even want the warranty replacement. I will never buy a Seagate drive again.

1 year... 5 year... doesn't really matter. I had 4 of 4 seagate 1 tb drives fail. The warranty replacements failed. The replacements of the warranty replacements failed. In the end, you don't even want the warranty replacement. I will never buy a Seagate drive again.

Usually, when companies stand behind their product with a 5 year warranty, then they use better parts.

Total myth. Quality of the parts has nothing to do with the length of warranties for consumer hard drives. A few years back when there were a lot more manufacturers and everyone was moving their warranties around from 1 to 3 to 5 years and back again, it had nothing to do with how the drives were being made. It's simply a marketing thing to make consumers think what you are claiming and attempt to gain a competitive edge. Shorter warranties don't mean worse quality parts, the hard drive business is a very low margin market, so cost savings like shorter warranties have become common place now that most of the competition has gone out of business or been bought out.

Any warranty longer than 3 years should not be a deciding factor. If you're using a drive longer than 3 years, you're doing it wrong and just asking for trouble.